Sharon Jacob is an Assistant Professor of New Testament at Pacific School of Religion. Sharon earned her Bachelors Degree in Accounting from Bangalore University and went on to earn her Masters of Divinity from Lancaster Theological Seminary and Masters of Sacred Theology from Yale University. She earned her Ph.D from Drew University. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, race and whiteness theory, and postcolonial theory. Her book currently under publication with Palgrave Publishers' Bible and Culture series is entitled: Reading Mary Alongside Indian Surrogate Mothers: Violent Love, Oppressive Liberation, and Infancy Narratives. In this book Sharon takes a hard look at the growing industry of surrogacy in India and uses the stories of these real life mothers as a lens to reread the Biblical figure of Mary in the infancy narratives with the hope that a more complex and nuanced interpretation of her motherhood can begin to emerge within the globalized context. Some of the courses that she has taught include: Reading the New Testament Through the Eyes of the Margins, Revelation:Then and Now, and Interpreting the Bible through Movement.
By Sharon Jacob. “When a Hindu man marries a Muslim woman, it is always portrayed as romance and love by Hindu organizations, while when the reverse happens it is depicted as coercion.” Charu Gupta, Historian at University of Delhi Genesis 34 is the story of Dinah and the Shechemites. The most common interpretations of Genesis […]
By Sharon Jacob. In her seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri C. Spivak points out that the subaltern cannot speak not because, “the subaltern cannot pronounce words or produce sentences. The subaltern “cannot speak,” instead, because her speech falls short of fully authorized, political speech. Too much gets in the way of her message’s being heard, socially […]
By Sharon Jacob. In many cultures, mass-suicides have been used as a form of protest against foreign colonization. In India, the ritual of Jauhar was traditionally performed by upper caste Rajput women that immolated themselves by jumping into flames together. Lakshana N. Palat describes the ritual in detail writing, “At night, they would dress in […]
Recent calls made by the GOP Presidential candidates to accept Christian Syrian refugees in the United States and India’s decision under the Modi government to grant non-Muslim refugees extended stay are deeply problematic. Such pronouncements not only depict the ways in which Muslim refugees are represented as violent, aggressive, and a threat to national security, […]
Recent comments by the presidential candidate Ben Carson on Muslims in the United States, and the controversial beef ban in India that has led to the murders of Muslims, causes one critically analyze the word “secularism” with regards to the Muslim identity living in a globalized world. In a world that is quickly and increasingly […]